small win: dose history stopped being a problem at week 86
Check-in as promised in the title: small win: dose history stopped being a problem at week 86.
The attribution problem, which is the reason most logs on this board cannot answer the question their owner is asking.
If dose, training, intake and sleep all changed in the same fortnight, no analysis of the resulting numbers can tell you which one moved the outcome. That is not a limitation of your spreadsheet; it is a limitation of the design.
The fix is unglamorous: change one thing at a time, leave it long enough to see, and annotate the weeks where something else intruded anyway — because life will intrude. A log with honest annotations answers questions. A log with four simultaneous changes and a confident conclusion is the most common thing posted here, and it does not.
A log is only interpretable if the conditions are consistent. Same day, same time, same state, same scale — otherwise you are recording measurement variability rather than change.
Ask me anything specific. Anything general I will probably get wrong.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Why contemporaneous beats reconstructed, with the failure mode.
Memory smooths. Reconstructing a fortnight from recollection produces a series that is more regular, more consistent with your current beliefs, and quietly wrong in a direction that flatters the story you are already telling.
I found this out by reconstructing six weeks and later finding order receipts that contradicted my own entries. The log was not a little wrong; it was wrong in exactly the direction that made my narrative work. Write it down on the day, even the boring days, especially the boring days.
Correction: those two entries are 4 weeks apart, not consecutive, which changes how the middle of that series reads.
write the concentration in the log too
Left up. Dates, consistent conditions and annotations, which is the standard here.
Agreed. One line a week that actually gets written beats an elaborate template abandoned in month two.
Choose a format you will still be able to open in two years. Plain text or a spreadsheet you export beats an application that may not exist.
log what you did, not what you meant to do
Added a sleep column late and immediately understood two of my worst weeks.
Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift is systematic rather than random because memory smooths.
Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift is systematic rather than random because memory smooths.
teodor_szabo is right about blanks. Silent gaps make the series lie.
the value of a log is in month six, not week one
Exported the whole thing to a plain text file after nearly losing it in an app that shut down.
Disagree with daily weighing. You are logging fluid, and the emotional cost is real for very little information.
one line a week beats a spreadsheet you abandon
a log is not a plan and it is not advice for anybody else
Yes — log what happened rather than what you intended. My retrospective entries were quietly wrong every time.
Yes — log what happened rather than what you intended.
Disagreeing with this bit: daily weighing gives you noise and costs you something.
Same. Waist monthly was the column I added late and wish I had started with.
Are the missed weeks in there as blanks or dropped entirely?
annotate the weeks where something else changed
- 1the value of a log is in month six, not week one7 comments in this branch · started by u/emil_agyeman